ELL: Wall Street Journal editorial

[John & Debbie Clifton]

Mauro Tosco writes:

> ... But we must also remember that the enemy No. 1 of
> language and cultural diversity is not the market. It
> is the nation-state. It is a government which has
> compulsory education in its schools in the language it
> has decided your children must learn. It is a government
> which makes a language policy. It has always been so,
> and it keeps being so.

This statement is difficult to test, since government policies and 'the
market' so frequently are the same. But our research in Azerbaijan brings
this statement into question. Official government policy is that all ethnic
groups have the right to education in their own language. Thus, while
Azerbaijani is the official state languages, in many areas there are schools
with Russian as the language of instruction alongside schools with
Azerbaijani as the language of instruction. And the Georgian minority in
northwest Azerbaijan have some schools in which Georgian is the language of
instruction. Other groups that speak less-widely spoken languages as a first
language generally use Russian or Azerbaijani as the general language of
instruction, but have the option to teach the mother tongue as a subject.
While these mother tongue classes are generally only taught for the first
several years of school, the Lezgi community has 11 years of Lezgi classes
as part of the schools. There is also a Lezgi pedagogical institution to
prepare Lezgi-language teachers.

In short, there is no 'compulsory education in ... the language it has
decided your children must learn.' In spite of this, in a number of
communities in which less-widely spoken languages are used, there is no
desire to incorporate vernacular language classes in the schools. We have
conducted sociolinguistic research among a number of these communities, and
our findings are that most people are eager for their children to be fully
bilingual in their historic vernacular *and* Azerbaijani. The impetus for
learning Azerbaijani seems to be purely economic. People believe that their
children will not get the best jobs unless they speak Azerbaijani well. Some
are even speaking Azerbaijani to their children in the home, in the belief
that their children will automatically learn the historic vernacular outside
the home. In some areas this has led to definite language shift.

I agree that government policies are important. However, economic conditions
are also important - in some situations even more important than government
policies.

John M Clifton

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